Wild Bird Trust photographers of the week

Another picture from my Golden Eagle workshop is now published by Steve Boyes of Wild Bird Trust on National Geographic’s NewsWatch. It is always a great pleasure to have a picture chosen among the 25 selected for the week. This week has many great picture so please check them out.

As I said my picture this week is also from Kalvträsk. This time it’s a flight shot when the male Golden Eagle is getting ready to land.

It is a really nice picture that is almost perfect in my eyes. I would have wanted the claws to be a little sharper but that is just a minor detail. The Eagle had a favorite place where it usually sat to have a good view over the area. We had seen the bird earlier during midday when it sat in the tree together with the female. It seems like it was monitoring something and that might have been a White-tailed Eagle that had been seen previous that week.

This flight shot is from when the male Eagle reappeared in the evening when the sun was setting. I saw it land on one of the favorite branches. I was taking photos of the Jay’s at that time so I just had to raise the lens to get the Golden Eagle in focus. I thought it would just sit there like during midday so I changed the shutter speed and the aperture to for a portrait because the Eagle sat beautifully in the golden light.

I saw that the Eagle changed posture just as I felt ready to take the portrait. Off it went and I followed the flight until it landed just in front of the hide. I hadn´t any chance to raise the shutter but I was lucky that I was shooting a full aperture and I therefore had an okay shutter for the flight sequence. I got four good pictures and this full frame picture is the best of the lot. I have already made a 30x40cm print of it and the picture will probably end up on one of the walls at home.